Today's protective knee pads are built and designed to provide excellent protection for high impact falls and collisions that a user might subject them to. In events such as roller derby, skateboarding, inline skating and motocross, just to name a few.
A knee pad usually includes, but is of limited to, an irregularly shaped piece or multiple pieces of padded material, such as foam, that are molded and folded to form around the contours of the knee to provide protection with a degree of flexibility.
This padding is usually covered with a durable fabric. Attachment systems that secure the pad to the knee vary. Common ones are straps that wrap around the thigh and calf and also flexible sleeves in which the leg can slide into.
One major component of today's protective knee pads is its exterior cap, shield, or shell, that is comprised of a rigid material and covers its front face to act as the first line of defense with a collision to the ground or into another object, shielding its wearer of injury and the pad from the abrasion of the ground surface.
Originally, knee pads were created with protection in mind. This also applied to their protective shells which have continued to their present designs. Unrecognized within prior art is that the shells are limited in their ability to contain art, images, or graphics on them.
Shells in the patents of U.S. Pat. No. 5,255,391 to Levine, 1993 Oct. 26 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,643 to Beutler, 1999 Nov. 23 show a basic opaque shell with no specification toward transparency or a shape receptive for graphics to be applied on the interior or exterior of them.
9626,293 to Pacetti, 2010 Oct. 26 show a shell with an attachment system using hook and loop fasteners that is contiguous between the interior of the shell and the cloth covering. This type of attachment system has been used extensively within the field and Pacetti's embodiment is a slight variation upon that method. Pacetti's embodiment uses hook and loop on the interior of the shell that would otherwise cover and or block any attempt to place graphics on the underside of the shell if that shell were to be transparent or semitransparent to show graphics from the underside or interior of the shell.
Again, as in the previous aforementioned patents, no specific examples of shape, transparency or attachment systems have been mentioned with regard to the shell's receptivity toward graphics.
Shells that have been previously mentioned in the introduction have been exhibited as an element of protective knee pads. This has been done for illustrative purposes only. The embodiment of the shells that have been mentioned and any further examples may apply but are not limited to other areas of protective gear such as the protective shells on elbow pads, the shells contained on motorcycle jackets, the shells contained on bmx (bicycle motocross) protective gear, or the shells on a baseball catcher's leg gear; just to name a few.
All protective shells on protective gear heretofore known suffer from these disadvantages in regard toward applying graphics to them. The protective shells are made with materials that are solid, opaque colors. Due to this fact, graphics and or text have to be placed on the exterior of the shell, the face that is farthest away from the joint, to be seen, leaving the graphics and or text exposed to be scraped off when the shells slide against the ground during a fall or collision of the user. This also leaves the unwanted affect of paint, glue and or residue from the graphics as a result of being scraped off of the shell and onto a surface such as a wooden floor of a roller rink, as an example. Shells have been rounded in shape to conform to its underlying protection such as foam that protects the knee, as an example, but a specific shell shape has not been developed to protect graphics from being scraped off the shell as a result of friction from the shell onto the ground or into another object. Many shell attachment systems, such as hook and loop, that are on the interior side of the shell, or the contiguous face closest to the joint, block or eliminate a space that otherwise could be used for the application of graphics. A shell made with a transparent or semi-transparent material has not been created for protective gear to implement the placement of graphics on the face of the shell that is contiguous or closest to the joint. In other words, its interior or underside.